Once upon a Time in Anatolia
2012; Issue: 86 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Turkey's Politics and Society
ResumoNun Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia shared the Grand Prix at Cannes 2011 with the Dardenne brothers' The Kid with a Bike and was highly anticipated by the time it was screened at TIFF. It is a film of great visual beauty and substance, and its length of 157 minutes is entirely justified; nothing is extraneous in its leisurely unfolding of the narrative. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a police procedural, a generic subsection ot crime fiction that deals with the details and logistics of criminal investigations. The emphasis is on issues pertaining to process, as opposed, for example, to exposing the killer. The film takes place largely over the span of a long night. A suspect, Kenan (Firat Tanis), has admitted killing an acquaintance in his small town, and is being driven to the countryside where he has promised to reveal where he and another suspect, Ramazan (Burhan Yildiz) buried the body. The group consists of a convoy of three vehicles including the two suspects, the police commissioner Naci (Yilmaz Erdo[euro]an), his driver Arab All, a medical examiner / Doctor Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), a prosecutor Nusrat (Taner Birset) and a few extra men (who will dig up the body, gather evidence etc.). After a few false starts (the murderer is entirely sure of the location, given the homogeneity of the landscape, the darkness, his state of drunkenness at the time of the killing) and a short respite at the home of a local Mukhtar, the mayor of a nearby village, the site and body are found and the corpse is collected. The final movement of the film takes place the following day; the suspects are returned to the town to be taken into custody and an autopsy is performed to determine the cause of death. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Once Upon a Time in Anatolia uses its frame of a procedural, its setting of small town life and its structure of a journey through the primordial steppes during the stormy night, to raise questions about human co-existence. Social life is regulated by codes that ensure accountable, moral behaviour. Within the realm of private life, parents are responsible for their children and couples to each other. There are social responsibilities to members of one's community and laws that enforce a system of justice that punishes transgressions. This is the way members of a society respect and protect one another. The film demonstrates that codes cannot always perfectly accommodate human frailties. Life is clear cut and a certain amount of generosity and empathy is necessary to temper the rigidities of every system. The opening scene preceding the credits raises the problem of seeing clearly and Jucidly. The camera tracks towards a window, and the shot is blurry and obscured. The image comes into focus and reveals the scene behind it - a group of three men are drinking and eating convivially. The shots following the credits are of the convoy driving through the landscape. It is revealed that one of the three has been killed, and although the murderer has confessed, the question of justice and punishment is more complicated than it appears initially. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a film that emphasizes the long shot; it includes the repeated visualization of the hills and 'monotonous' (1) roads, and the oneiric tone created by the elements to point to the ephemeral nature of human existence. Despite the hierarchies established in the narrative (Nacir defers to the prosecutor, Arab Au defers to Nacir, etc.) the quest for the body in the steppes reminds the protagonists that everyone is equalized in death. No one lives forever ... A hundred years from now, the doctor ponders, not a trace remains .... This perception undercuts the divisions between the men and stresses instead a shared humanity. It also qualifies the illusion of control that accompanies man's egocentric view ol the world. The inclusion of shots like the long take of an apple that rolls downstream and meanders until it comes to a stop, suggests a degree of happenstance and arbitrariness that eludes prediction and control. …
Referência(s)